The Hong Kong Factor

...The hope is that such a guarantee of sanctuary, if needed, would keep the most valuable members of the colony from fleeing, and that by 1997 the current regime in Beijing will have been replaced by reform-minded Chinese leaders...

...Tebbitt does concede that asylum should be granted to Hong Kongers who truly would be in danger of Communist political persecution after 1997...

...In her New Year's Day message the Prime Minister, long criticized for being uncaring, offered a pledge to make the 1990s a " caring decade...

...Some hardliners have interpreted her words as code for relaxing the Tory drive to close down the last vestiges of the welfare state that they hold responsible for Britain's economic decline in the '70s...

...They include Foreign Secretary Hurd, Environment Minister Chris Patten and former Education Minister and now Conservative Party Chairman Kenneth Baker...

...To begin with, Beijing resents what it considers British meddling at this stage of the takeover process...

...COMPLICATING BRITISH POLITICS The Hong Kong Factor BY NORMAN GELB London In 1997, to the despairof many of the 5.6 million people who live in Hong Kong, Britain will return to China the territory Queen Victoria gouged from it 150 years ago in the days of gunboat diplomacy...

...On February 16, after a committee in Beijing ratified its final version of the constitution that will eventually govern the colony, called the Basic Law, liberal and moderate Hong Kong politicians protested what they perceived as the British knuckling under to the Chinese, while several thousand student demonstrators filled the streets...

...But the whole situation is rather more complicated...

...The Chinese unhappiness extends to democratic changes being contemplated for Hong Kong prior to 1997, because London is uncomfortable about transferring to a totalitarian regime a colony where civil rights are guaranteed more by common practice than formal constitutional decree...

...All those considerations aside, though, the government's position on immigration from Hong Kong actually is a fragile one...

...But no matter how deeply felt Tebbitt's convictions may be on the Hong Kong issue, there are suspicions in Whitehall that his vehement criticism of the Conservative government he himself belonged to a short time ago has a wider political dimension...

...He claims its approach in the case of Hong Kong contradicts the policy of limiting newcomers that helped the Conservatives win three successive national elections...

...Such communities are a potential source of division, friction and, at the extreme, violence...

...In Britain itself, the Hong Kong issue has been a painful conundrum not only for the Conservatives, but for the Opposition Labor Party as well...

...At the same time, the government does not want a panic exodus that would precipitate the collapse of one of the world's most dynamic capitalist enclaves and create a refugee problem of horrific proportions...

...Although Thatcher has made it clear she intends to again head the Tory ticket in the next national elections (probably next year), speculation about her eventual successor as Tory leader is rife...

...In addition, many of them are not convinced that the promised democratic reforms will ever be implemented...

...Formerly one of Prime Minister Thatcher's closest political intimates, Tebbitt accuses her government of following a double standard...

...Thus Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd has proposed allowing 50,000 heads of Hong Kong families, along with their spouses and offspring (an estimated 250,000 people in all) to settle in Britain with full citizenship should they wish to do so...

...The suspicions are not farfetched...

...Indeed, the integration of nonwhites into British society has been regrettably slow...

...Hurd's proposal to limit the residency dispensation to Hong Kong's "top people" smacks of intolerable elitism in Labor's view, and insults the mass of HongKongers by implicitly portraying them as unworthy...

...The intraparty crossfire over Hong Kong, with Tebbitt back on the political front line, could therefore very well be the opening shots in the struggle for control of the party after Thatcher finally departs...

...The agreement stipulating the details of the changeover was signed in 1984, when China was undergoing wide-ranging liberalization and reform...

...If that were not enough to shake up the party "drys" like Tebbitt, the Iron Lady has herself been softening her general attitude toward social problems, perhaps because of the Labor Party's recent upward surge in the public opinion polls...

...Having no acceptable solution to the predicament, Opposition spokesmen are confined to heaping scorn on the Foreign Secretary, who is stuck with the task of trying to devise one...

...Norman Gelb, the NL's London correspondent, is the author most recently of Dunkirk: The Complete Story of the First Step in the Defeat of Hitler...

...It may be an impossible task, because his scheme has also come under fire in his own ranks...

...As Tebbitt, a plain talker, never fails to emphasize, the majority of the favored business and professional people who would be permitted to settle in Britain would be primarily "economic migrants," not political refugees, and hence similar to most of the Vietnamese boat people who made their way to Hong Kong only to be sent back by the British authorities...

...The Tory campaign manifesto for the last election said specifically, "We will tighten the existing law [on immigration] to ensure that control over settlement becomes even more effective...

...And the recent emergence of a sizable, highly vocal, essentially segregated British Moslem community—some of whose senior members seem determined to see the death sentence passed by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on controversial author Salman Rushdie carried out—has exacerbated feelings about the unsettling influence of foreign cultures on British standards and mores...

...But he goes on to declare: "I have long opposed the establishment [in Britain] of large unintegrated communities divided from the British people by culture, language, religion and ethnic origin...

...The "wets," of course, are today seen as possible contenders...

...On their part, Hong Kongers understandably resent a policy of picking and choosing who is and who is not welcome in Britain...

...His view is shared by Britons who have never reconciled themselves to the development of a multiracial, multicultural country, with substantial groups of West Indian and African blacks, Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis...

...Consequently, they refrain from urging such a course of action, despite the fact that not many Hong Kongers would be likely to take advantage of the opportunity anyway...

...This privilege would be effectively limited to the individuals whorunthe colony's administration and business and financial services...

...Norman Tebbitt, an exchairman of the Conservative Party and still a backbench member of Parliament, has roundly condemned Hurd's proposed changes in the immigration laws...

...He estimates their number to be "in the low tens of thousands...

...During the past few years an interesting trend has been noticeable...

...For even though Hong Kong is a Crown Colony, its inhabitants have been refused automatic residence here by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government...

...Now, however, Hong Kongers fear being placed in the hands of those responsible for the slaughter in Tiananmen Square last spring—whom they call the Ceausescus of Beijing—and the matter shows signs of becoming a serious issue in British politics...

...This is in keeping with relatively recent policy sharply curtailing the right of immigration of former subjects from throughout the once far-flung British Empire...

...There was comparatively little concern then in Hong Kong, since its essential character was supposed to be maintained as a "special Administrative Region" by its new rulers for 50 years...

...Several prominent Conservative politicians unhappy with the hard-line social policies that have been Thatcher's trademark— dubbed the "wets"—have risen to senior rank in the Prime Minister's Cabinet...

...Already almost 1,000 emigrants a week are leaving Hong Kong for Singapore, Australia, Britain, France, Canada, and the United States, many of them welloff professional, technical and managerial personnel...

...On the other hand, the Laborites realize that to suggest opening the gates to more than 5 million Chinese would be electoral suicide...